Twitter now sells access to your old Tweets

since I published the post, I’ve been thinking more and more about how you will feel about Twitter gaining access to your personal Twitter streams.

We search for information on Twitter using the hashtags, and we have a limited time window to search out tweets from others. We then use the data to our advantage, finding out what our customers think about us.

As a user, are you happy that customers have access to all this data? After all, what you tweet is a social data gold mine for businesses. It gives brands the opportunity to find out more about you to target their marketing more effectively.

But we do tend to forget that we’re not having a 1:1 conversation with our friends. Twitter data is public. The data isn’t private, ever. Even if we send Direct messages to each other, then Twitter could be requested to expose the data if called on by the US government invoking the patriot act.

In my book, Working the Crowd I try to hammer home the point that you should ‘Never say anything online that you don’t want to have quoted back to you in a court of law’.

And now with the Datasift: Twitter partnership, this advice is even more valid for us all…